Bare
by Memphis Lupine
Summary: What never happened: images as read in a fire. [Anna.]


**Disclaimer:** I make no claims of ownership on any of the characters cotnained within this story. This is a work of fanfiction and as such has been written with no attention of financial gain.  
**Note:** Originally written for tempsmort's 'What Never Happened' challenge, on livejournal

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**Bare**

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Someone of a greater sentimentality might know it as grief madness; Anna knows it as she knows all things: a cold and clinical awareness of how things bring themselves to completion. An abstract view of the world, cut down to the black and the opposing white; and this is how she survives. She ties a knot in the thread hemming the sleeve of a new robe and bites the remnant off.

-

The clouds came from the east, west, north, driving in to swamp across the sky above the Asakura family home.

-

At night Anna woke from dreams she did not know to understand. Things she supposed were premonitions but were more like memories; like traveling years later upon an old road from a youth she never had. Half-worlds built themselves from shadows and fleeting impressions, bamboo and rivers; landscapes composed of calligraphy and watercolors; fire, ice, earth, wood, the night sky twisting up into a river of white where a man and a woman reached hands for one another from opposite sides.

Every time she woke and reached across the bed to where he wasn't, and would watch the ceiling until she remembered he would not be there again.

-

Once she dreamed she was a child, dressed in a dark coat and a white scarf in the middle of winter cutting like a knife through her lungs, same as when she first met Yoh. He crouched beside her, the same as then, headphones hooped about his neck and fingers deep in dirt. She couldn't hear him speak, though saw his mouth moving in a wide smile. He drew items from the dirt, earth collected in cracks and edges: a doll in a tightly pressed kimono; a music box; a pair of children's boots, yellow and plastic; a torn scroll with ancient characters inked upon it. She watched his hands dipping and pulling each from the earth, again and again, his hair black and fingernails caked with dirt, and wondered what she was looking for.

"Is it you," she said. He closed his hands around a flame and offered it to her, and then he was gone.

-

Anna read the fire and saw nothing but flames in her, about her, swallowing her whole. Like Yoh, she thought, and read from the fire no more.

-

He comes home with fire on his hands and, smiling at her as she watches the wall beyond his shoulder, washes it from his skin. Blood drains into the earth outside, and he shakes his hands clean before reaching for a towel. "You look pale today, Anna," he says. "Have you been standing out in the cold again?"

Her eyes flicker to glance over his. Anna turns from him and snaps the cloth in her arms, sharply, folding it over neatly before slipping it onto the stack of his clothes beside hers beside the wooden tub of sudsy water she hasn't emptied.

"Ah, Anna, please. Don't look away from me," he says. He leans against the wall and fiddles with the straps of his gloves as he pulls them on, smiles and keeps his eyes dark. She gathers up her clothes and leaves the room; leaves his clothes, the tub, him.

-

Yoh said, "Wait for me."

She brushed her hands dry across the towel. "Don't be long."

He breathed out, still slouching in the doorway. Beyond, the sky was slowly clouding grey with gathering snow, and the wind rattled against the windows. Anna set the towel down and straightened, turning to face him. Yoh smiled, half-sheepish, half-bittersweet, just him, and shrugged his shoulders, a little. "I'll try," he said, and laughed nervously. "You won't be too mad if I'm late, will you?"

"I will never forgive you," she said. She touched her hand to his cheek, kissed the other, and breathed him in.

"I need to go," he said.

"I'll wait," she said.

-

Once the small boy, Manta, had asked why? Without the nonsense of his other words (why do you do this? why do you have faith?) she took his question, turned it over as if in her hands, and knowing then, said, "I love Yoh."

-

She ate nothing the day of the reading.

Before, she bathed herself three times in the day: once to cleanse, in the morning at dawn; twice to sustain, shortly after noon; a third time in honor of the trinity thereof, when night drifted over day around five. Anna dressed herself in white and above, a dark red yukata, tying the cloth closed about her waist and leaving her hair to press damp and thick against her back. She lit no lamps and walked barefoot down the hall.

The fire she prepared in the hours of dark preceding midnight. She built up the altar of wood, a simple stack of squares with chips and leaves and sweet-smelling oils pushed inside. For an hour she waited silent in the dark, kneeling before the altar. Shadows moved across the wall; nothing more than ghostly traces of scattered moonlight brushing through the cracks in the thin walls. Anna memorized their movements and then banished them from her mind. The wind shook the trees; somewhere in the outer dark a branch fell to the ground with a hard crash, into dry leaves.

At midnight, she lit the fire and watched as the twigs snapped and the flames reached up in blind lashings. The heat caught upon the oil and flared, the fire rolling up, and she watched, still, her entire body motionless. Sweat prickled between her breasts and the wetness of her hair began to dry; the fire grew, again, beyond what it should. After a time, some hour or two, the fire dwindled and then went out.

Anna stood and hobbled silently, legs stinging, to the bucket of holy water in the corner which she used to drown the ashes and ember core, still flickering deep in the burnt remains. She left the bucket beside the fire.

-

She heated water above a fire in the back. The air, sharp and bitter with winter, filled her breath like smoke. After the water boiled, she took it from the metal grill and set it aside, turning to douse the fire with dirt. This was how he found her: dirt smudged against her hands and on her feet; snips of smoke trailing out from a crumbled pile of earth; eyes flat and reflecting the world back upon itself.

"Should the wife of a king toil in the dirt?" he asked. The note of surprise hung in the air; a lie. She did not look at him, standing between the trees. Anna closed her hands around the handle of the fat kettle, and turned to step back into the house.

"I have, of course, been looking for you." He stepped in behind her and gently slid the paper door, closed, as he watched her back with a smile.

"Leave." She turned the corner; he followed again, as at ease as if he had known this house for years. (Hadn't he.) "I will not allow intruders into my home."

"Your home?" He bent his hand against his chest, surprise again, and then smiled a second time, never quite reaching anything more than the narrow curve of his lips. Hao turned his palm against her face, smiling at her eyes reflecting him out as a shadow. "I was under the impression this, too, is mine."

Her hand burned against his skin, like ice. He cupped the red mark, beaming, and said to her ear, "You remind me of my mother."

She struck, again, though not to cut the smile; just, perhaps, the black of his eyes. "Go to hell."

"Do you know," Hao said, fingers pressed to his cheek, palm light on her chin, "Yoh is still with me." He took her hand, and pressed her fingers against his chest where the heart beat. An echo sounded into her skin, through the cloth.

"Get out of my house," she said.

-

In the last dream the child Yoh leaned up to kiss her cheek like a ghost: thin and so soft as to never have been. "This is for you," he said, and instead of fire placed a leaf in her hand. He closed her fingers around it and smiled, once, before she woke.

-

"Does it hurt you that I look like him?" he asks, drawing his fingers in lazy spirals through the dirt. She knows better than to believe the sense of relaxation he radiates; his eyes slant like a cat's. "Do you want him back?"

"Yes."

"If you hate me," he says, "why not just leave?"

She does not say Because I will not leave Yoh. She does not say I am waiting for him.

She turns to Hao and slaps him so the sound of her flesh striking his resounds in the air.

"I'll always know where you are, you know." His voice lights, and fades. "I'll find you someday. You're my wife."

"No," she says. "I'm not."

For a moment nothing, and this time it is Hao who turns into the house, leaving her sitting on the wooden slats and listening to spring being reborn.

-

She drew him out once, took his heartbeat and laid it over Hao's. "You did not come back to me," she said.

Yoh smiled at her. "I came back," he said. "Just not the way I wanted." Not the way you wanted. We wanted.

"I love you," Anna said.

"I know," Yoh said, and faded beneath Hao's heart.

-

Anna leaves, not in winter, but summer: the trees are green and the air is humid. She walks barefoot through the grass and doesn't turn back.

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End file.
